Word: jagan
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Dates: during 1953-1953
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Alone among Guiana's "Progressives," Janet Jagan, graduate of the U.S. Young Communist League, was trained in international Communism (although she says she now has no Communist Party connections). Daughter of a prosperous plumbing contractor who lived in Chicago and Detroit, she had finished 3½ years of college (Michigan State, Wayne, Detroit), and was a student nurse at Chicago's Cook County Hospital when she met Cheddi Jagan, a dentistry student at Northwestern in 1942. Ditching five other suitors, she married Cheddi, converted him to Marxism, helped him set up practice in British Guiana's capital...
Rumania Refresher. Starting the colony's first women's political group, stumping through the canebrakes to demand better housing for low-paid East Indian sugar workers, slim, serious Janet Jagan soon became the most talked-about woman in British Guiana. The waiting room of the Jagans' dental office became the meeting place of the discontented, and especially of those who sought independence for the colony. In 1947, after Jagan won a seat in the legislature, the Jagans sparked a bitter sugar strike in which five workers were killed. Founding the Progressive Party, Janet became secretary general...
...Communist propaganda. Then the new ministers fomented another big sugar strike that shut down the colony's main industry. When that petered out, they brought in a bill to force recognition of their Red-led union, and denounced "that man Savage" in open-air rallies. And when Janet Jagan drafted a party declaration demanding that London abolish the governor's control powers and other constitutional checks, the Colonial Office apparently decided that it was faced with a determined Red plot to seize full power...
...colony. Though news leaked from Bermuda that the cruiser Superb had sailed with sealed orders, there was no violence. As the Royal Welsh Fusiliers and Marines fanned out to occupy key points around Georgetown, and the radio announced suspension of the constitution and dismissal of the legislature, Premier Jagan made the understatement of the week: "We are most unhappy about the situation." He and the other Red-tinged ministers were not detained or molested in any way, but the legislature's dismissal had neatly squeezed them out of their jobs...
...first, adopting an air of injured innocence. Jagan & Co. announced that they would take their case to the U.N. and to British opinion. Then they got their second wind, and Janet dashed off a fiery manifesto beginning: "Our country has been invaded by foreign troops . . ." and calling, almost in the same breath, for a general strike, a boycott and nonviolence. In London, a few Labor M.P.s cautiously questioned whether it had been necessary to act quite so forcefully. "Better to be in good time than too late," replied Winston Churchill. That seemed to be exactly the view...